2010-12-02

As you can tell, I've been playing with a way to create real blog posts from Delicious, not just an RSS feed splice. The old feed splice was being done with Feedburner, and it usually worked pretty well, but it lacked the flexibility I wanted and furthermore, it wouldn't actually create a post here. It would only show up in the RSS feed.

Delicious has an "experimental" (as in, not maintained since 2008) "Blog Posting Tool" that simply refuses to work with Blogger, the platform we currently use. In fact, it's so arcane that I don't really know if anyone has ever really made it work on anything other than Wordpress.

I threw something together in PHP that uses the Simple HTML DOM library to parse the output of the Delicious API. One part of that library that broke pretty spectacularly at first was trying to grab the "tag" attribute of each element. Simple HTML DOM uses "tag" as a variable name all over the place, and it caused some major recursion. I used preg_replace to change the name of "tag" to something else to avoid this namespace collision.

It's written in PHP because I was originally planning on cooking up something web-based, but I went more lightweight instead. Who knows, maybe I'll re-write it later on. Perhaps perl, python, ruby or even newLISP would have been better for this. It's designed to be run manually from the command-line or (more specifically) a nightly cron job.

I just know that there aren't any easy-to-use solutions for posting Delicious links to Blogger, and a lot of people seem to want something like this. It's rough, has some vestigial debugging code left in it, and it's probably not easy enough for most folks. It does what I wanted it to do, though, and you'll probably be seeing a lot more frequent link posts because of it.

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About HiR

HiR is what happens when 1990s-era e-Zine writers decide to form a blog. Most of us hail from the Great Plains region of the United States.

Ax0n, HiR founder and editor-in-chief is an information security specialist currently working in the luxury goods industry.

Asmodian X joined HiR in December 1997 and currently works as a web developer and SysAdmin in the education industry.

Frogman has been on board since May 1998 and has many technical passions. When not experimenting with obscure hardware, he can be found leaping from one rooftop to the next, making the world his office.

TMiB has also been helping since 1998. Also our resident Physicist and go-to guy for xkcd jokes we don't get, The Man in Black currently works in the Internet industry in an east-coast data center.